Touch the timeless with William Wentz

GO ART

June 12, 2003|By Geoff Gehman Of The Morning Call

William Wentz is an outdoorsman whose watercolors make you want to roam the outdoors. His exhibition at the Baum School of Art, where he teaches watercoloring, makes you want to ride an Amish buggy through the snow or a dune buggy through mud flats.

A late bloomer who really took to watercolors at age 55, the Palmerton native gravitates to timeless subjects: an off-season farm; a smoke house; a stone bridge by a fishing stream at the height of the fall. He makes these scenes even more timeless by giving them comfortable perspectives and comforting personalities. The buildings in "Amish Buggy" are nicely hunkered down with a nice, low fire, as if they're glazed.

Wentz is equally adept at broad, whitewashing light and narrow, filtered light. He mixes impressionism with realism easily. His creeks change color and character. His fall leaves are rusty, giddy riots. His grass pokes through snow like cooling hot pokers.

Wentz's skies are charismatic chameleons. The star of "Winter Sky" mimics ghostly hands clasping fingers to block the sun. A smoky, unfinished sky in "Drydock in the Snow" is nothing less than memory, pouring. The decanting skyline makes a happily colored boat marooned on shore seem less orphaned.

Wentz's floralscapes are meeker than his landscapes. The intensities in "Flowers Galore" are tight to the point of choking. His still lifes are tamer still. Fruit tends to be chunky and chalky; arrangements seem jammed and posed. Turnips, though, are a welcome addition to the cornucopia.

The Gallery at St. John's is presenting a yin-yang show of works by Virginia Abbott and Isadore LaDuca, partners in art and life.

Abbott's "Day and Night" features a compelling bust of a somber Alice in Wonderland, her head backed by an even more compelling sculpture of a girl in a spooky hood. A Dickensian nightmare is diminished by a pair of rather harsh columns reliefed with cat heads. The supports simulate a speaker cabinet, which reduces the two-headed bust to a kind of spiritual stereo.

Abbott's model for a breast-cancer monument is memorably harrowing. A rotting black bra cup hooks a flat-chested, running figure by the upper back and left heel. Unfortunately, the pain is diminished by a scratched, clunky box.

LaDuca paints and draws psychological screens, mental landscapes divided by panels of solid color or swirling patterns. The bars in "Release from Bocklin's Island" interrupt the eye abruptly. If they were more malleable, more permeable, there would be a better transition between rocks, night surf and an interior seemingly, cleverly, abstracted from a Matisse parlor.

"Anterior Landscape" is tighter and sharper. Pea-green bands, opaque and translucent, frame an engaging rendition of roads leading to Lafayette College. The curtain-like strips encourage entering and dispersing; they elevate a landscape to a transmutation chamber.

LaDuca and Abbott collaborate on a floor screen, a snappy twist on a classical relief of courtly Greek scenes. The folding panels are painted and carved, bisected by penetrating panels of blue-black branches as expressive as witches' fingers. Living artists appear to shake hands with ancient artists; the unconscious appears to invade the conscious.

Still, LaDuca's studies on paper are crisper and more expansive. They're more cinematic than the floor screen; they flicker through time, space and limbo.

"After All," new works by Virginia Abbott and Isadore LaDuca, through June 29, The Gallery at St. John's, St. John's Lutheran Church, 330 Ferry St., Easton. Hours: noon to 3 p.m. Sunday. 610-258-6119.

AN ITALIAN HONOR

An international committee of art critics has chosen Eric Armusik of Hamburg to exhibit paintings in the fourth Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte Contemporanea in Florence, which will be held Dec. 6-14 at the Fortezza da Basso.

In 1995 Armusik studied 17th-century Italian painting in Todi, Italy, while completing a degree in studio art and art history at Penn State University. He specializes in dramatically shadowed, fire-glowing scenes of childhood abuse and adult problems. In "Last Picked" a boy leans glumly against gym bleachers; in "Life" a man sucks a woman's breast in a setting that crosses baroque with science fiction.

Armusik is influenced by a pair of controversial painters. Caravaggio was blasphemed by the Catholic church for depicting saints as struggling, dirty humans. Artemesia Gentileschi, a Caravaggio follower, won a rape trial against an older teacher who falsely declared she knew little about perspective.

Armusik runs a graphic design/Web site business that makes brochures, billboards and other promotional materials. His clients range from the Berks Prison Society to American Fusion Chili.